


One Bad Call

by OreoLuvr13



Series: Buck and May and Some Sibling Love [5]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Bobby and Athena are Buck's Parents, COVID-19 (mentioned), Established Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pneumonia, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24720457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OreoLuvr13/pseuds/OreoLuvr13
Summary: As the daughter of a cop and a step-daughter of a firefighter, May is well aware that all it takes is one bad call to change everything.  Still that does little to prepare her when she returns to her dorm after taking her last final for the semester to find her mother waiting outside her door, in civilian clothes and a day earlier than planned. May just knows that something’s wrong.
Relationships: Athena Grant/Bobby Nash, Evan "Buck" Buckley & May Grant (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Series: Buck and May and Some Sibling Love [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1766836
Comments: 16
Kudos: 307
Collections: 9-1-1 Tales





	One Bad Call

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the where the +1 scene comes from in my 5 Times fic. It’s going to be a rough one so buckle up guys.

May feels happy. Relieved. Giddy, even. Whatever you want to call it. Its finals week and she’s officially done for the semester. No more papers, group projects, and exams now that she has just finished taking her Developmental and Lifespan Psychology final exam. She sips on her extra sugary caffeinated beverage as she walks back to her dorm, in no real hurry for the first time in weeks.

She’s done for the semester, but she’s not going home until tomorrow. It’s a Thursday so it’s just easier for her to stay today and leave tomorrow when both her mom and Bobby can get the day off, which is fine with her. She can use the down time to recuperate from the end of the semester craziness. Her plan for the rest of the day is to finish packing up her room and see her friends who haven’t left yet for the semester. Her parents, Bobby, and Harry are picking her up tomorrow and will be dropping Chiara off at the airport on their way home where she will no doubt be immersed in Christmas festivities for the next week. From the texts that she’s been getting from her family over the last couple of weeks it’s probably a good thing that she can spend the rest of the day to recupe and store up some energy. She’s definitely going to need it with everything that her family has planned. May can’t wait.

May is digging into her bag for her room key when she walks onto her floor. Even with her head down, she can see out of the corner of her eye that someone is standing outside of her suite. Did Chiara or another one of her suitemates forget their key?

“May?” the voice asks as she walks closer with her key in hand.

“Mom?” May asks confused, looking up. She’s supposed to be working today. That’s part of the rationale behind May staying up at school for the rest of the day, but her mom isn’t in her uniform. What is even more alarming is that her mom isn’t smiling. She’s always smiling when she first lays eyes on her daughter after not seeing her after a few days, let alone weeks. May hasn’t been home since Thanksgiving and hasn’t seen any of her family since then. But now after three weeks her mom is standing out her suite a day early with one of the most serious faces she has ever seen on her. Something’s wrong.

May unlocks her door and they make their way into her suite. “What are you doing here?”

Her mom’s eyes look over the living room to where May’s suitemate, Olivia, is sitting with her ear buds in, eyes fixed on her computer screen. She then tilts her head towards May’s room. “Is Chiara in?”

May shakes her head immediately understanding why her mother asked. She wants them to have some privacy. “She won’t be back for another hour or so,” May replies as she opens the door to her room. Whatever her mom has to tell her is serious enough that she doesn’t want to have an audience. 

“What’s wrong?” May asks as soon as her mom shuts the door. Every worse case scenario starts to run through her mind. What happened? Is it her dad? He’s doing great now but it was just about this time two years ago when her dad got the news about the cancer. Is it back? Oh god, did something happen with her brother? Is it Bobby or Buck? She didn’t see anything on the news about any firefighters getting injured in a fire, but that doesn’t mean anything. She’s been around first responders enough to know that anything can happen on a call.

“Mom, tell me.” May asks, voice cracking.

Her mom doesn’t say anything at first as she pulls her daughter into a tight embrace, as if readying her for the news that’s about to come. What if something is wrong with her mom? Maybe she came up here by herself to tell May some awful news that she did not want to say in front of her dad or Bobby. “Mom, you’re scaring me.”

Her mom pulls away, pushing a piece of her daughter’s hair behind her ear. “Pack a bag, May. You’re coming home now.”

“I am?” May asks. She has even more questions now. “But I’m not even done packing and we need to take Chiara to the airport tomorrow.”

Athena puts her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Pack what you need for a few days. Your lap top. Anything you don’t want to keep here over break. We’ll pick you up anything you may have forgotten and need when we get home. We’ll figure out getting Chiara to the airport later, I promise. But we need to get going.”

May shakes her head. She’s not doing anything until what she knows what the hell is going on. Why is her mom up here a day early telling her she needs to come home now. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Athena takes a seat on her daughter’s bed. May sits down when her mom pats the spot next to her. “It’s Buck, baby. He’s in the hospital. It’s bad. Real bad.”

May sags against her pillows. Not Buck. He already survived a ladder truck crushing his leg, a tsunami, and two pulmonary embolisms. What’s even worse is that in spite of everything that Buck has been through over the years she has never seen her mom react to any of those things the way she is right now. “What happened to him? It wasn’t a fire, was it? I mean, I didn’t see anything on the news. Oh god, was he in a car accident? Are Chris and Eddie okay? Did—”

Her mom stops her with a squeeze of her knee. “No, honey. Eddie and Chris are fine. It wasn’t a car accident.” She takes a deep breath before she continues. “Last weekend there was a call. Some rich fools were having a Christmas party on a boat not too far off shore. I don’t know all the details but somehow Buck ended up hitting the deck hard before he went overboard. He got checked out and everything seemed fine except for a couple of bruised ribs and some teasing from the others,” her mom says with a small smile, not quite reaching her eyes.

“Then what happened?” May asks. Her mind not quite able to track how some bruised ribs and a trip overboard nearly a week ago has her mom so shaken up. “You just said he seemed fine.”

Athena nods her head. “Buck did seem fine. But then the coughing started. Of course, he said it was just a cold,” her mom replies with a roll of her eyes. Of course Buck would downplay how bad he was feeling. “But then he started running a fever. He even called out the day before last.”

Buck called out? He never calls out. More like Eddie probably threatened him into doing it.

“Said that he just needed a day to ‘sleep it off,’” Athena says using air quotes. “Told Bobby that he’ll be ready to go for his next shift. But then his fever got really high…and he scared Eddie really bad so Eddie brought him to the ER Tuesday night.”

May knows there’s more to the story. She can only imagine how bad Buck was to scare Eddie enough to bring him to the ER. Hell, Eddie is a war vet. He doesn’t scare easy.

Then her fear for Buck turns to anger. Buck has been in the hospital for the last day and a half and no one told her. She scrambles off her bed and begins to frantically pulls sweatshirts and towels from under her bed, only stopping when she locates her duffle bag. “Why didn’t you tell me?! Buck’s been in the hospital for the last day and a half and no one thought I needed to know.”

“May,” Athena says from her daughter’s bed. “We weren’t keeping things from you.”

“It sure feels that way,” Mays says ripping her duffle bag open. “Buck texted me yesterday asking me how my paper in my government class was going. He didn’t say anything about being in the hospital.”

Athena moves towards the end of her bed and closer to her daughter, watching her with a raised eyebrow as the teenager angrily throws clothes into her bag “And you’re surprised by that? Of course Buck didn’t tell you he was in the hospital. He didn’t want any of us to tell you either. He knows how tough this semester has been for you.”

May stops tossing clothes into her bag, a pile of shirts still in hand. This was a tough semester. Her classes are definitely getting tougher now that she has finished most of her gen requirements. And she definitely shouldn’t have picked up so many extra hours at the library and the tutoring center.

But still. She should have been told. They’re family and family are always there for each other. How can you be there if you don’t know what’s going on. “Still, you should have told me.”

Her mom nods her head sadly. “You’re right. Maybe we should have. But the pneumonia was responding to the antibiotics. His fever was going down and his vitals were looking better. We thought he would be released before you got home.”

May notices how her mother is using the past tense. _The pneumonia was. His fever was. His vitals were. We thought he would be released before you got home._

Something must have happened that prompted her mother to miss work so that she can come get her from school a day early.

“What changed? If he was doing better and you guys thought he was coming home then why are you here now?”

Athena stands up and moves closer towards her daughter. “His fever spiked again last night and his breathing got really labored. They moved him into ICU so they can monitor his condition more closely. The pneumonia stopped reacting to the antibiotics so they’re trying a new one.”

Oh god. Buck’s in the ICU. That’s why Buck didn’t text her this morning. She thought that it was because he was getting Chris ready for school or that he was out on a call. Little did she know it was because he was fighting for every breath.

“Is he going to be okay?” May asks. She instantly feels like an idiot. Why did she ask that? She’s not a little kid and she knows that her mom doesn’t have all the answers.

Her mom runs a hand down her daughter’s cheek. “Oh, baby. You know your brother. Buckaroo is a lot stronger than most people give him credit for. I’m not going to lie, he’s really sick. But he knows he has a lot to fight for. I know he’s not going to give up without a fight. That’s not him.”

May wipes away the wetness on her cheeks. “You’re right.”

Athena smiles sadly. “Usually a mother will love to hear those words. I just wish it was under different circumstances.”

May turns back to packing her bag when her mom’s cell phone rings and she leaves the room to answer it. She makes herself only think about what she needs to pack to bring home. Nothing else. One thing at a time. She’s so engrossed in her task at hand that she doesn’t even hear her mom come back in until her mom calls her name.

“Yeah, Mom?” May asks looking up from her purse. “I’m almost ready to go.” If she thought her mom looked sad and beaten down before, she looks a hundred times worse now. “What’s wrong? Who was that on the phone?”

Athena swallows a few times before she can bring herself to speak. “That was Bobby. The doctors weren’t happy with Buck’s breathing so they…they put him on a ventilator.”

For what feels like the tenth time since she first saw her mom waiting outside her room, May feels like her world is crashing down. When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged in the US and was all over the news, she read, most of it was articles that Buck sent to her, about everything and anything on the coronavirus. From the toilet paper shortage, the percentage of asymptomatic transmission, the symptoms, to the vaccine studies. But most notably she read up on ventilators. The lack of them. The process of intubation. How the survival rate of a person went down drastically once they were intubated.

May takes a deep breath. She reminds herself that Buck doesn’t have COVID-19. He has pneumonia and he’s going to beat it. That Eddie, Maddie, Bobby, and her are going to remind Buck to fight like hell.

Oh shit, Eddie. He isn’t the best with his emotions at the best of times, but now? He must be a complete mess. No doubt trying to hold it all together. Reassuring Chris that everything is going to be okay. it’s nearly a week before Christmas, like any other kid his age Chris should be thinking of presents and holiday break, not about their parent being in the hospital. But Buck is going to make it. He didn’t survive a ladder truck and a freaken tsunami to die from a case of fucking pneumonia.

May pulls her duffle bag over her shoulder. In the most confident tone that she can muster she says, “Come on, Mom. Let’s go home. We got this _._ ”

Athena gives her a proud smile as she follows her out the door. “That’s my girl. Let’s go home.” 


End file.
